Snackcake is a young woman in the midst of a great adventure. Snackcake lives with her wonderful husband in the Middle East, where she is now attending business school, playing house, exploring her surroundings, and trying to keep from melting in her toasty environment. Her motto: “unwrap a smile!”
Mr. Snackcake and I recently returned from a 10-day getaway to London and Paris. While I had never really seen London and had always dreamed of visiting Paris, the locations were actually entirely secondary with this vacation. The trip was born out of the serendipitously overlapping European vacation schedules of my parents and my in-laws, who had independently made plans to visit London and Paris respectively, and who very much wanted to see my husband and I. Them coming to us during the month of Ramadan wouldn’t have made sense (lots of stuff closes and no food or drink is allowed in public during the day), and we were eager to escape the humid 120-degree weather, so tagging along on our families’ vacations was the perfect solution.
Early in the morning after my last final exam of the semester, we flew to London to spend 5 days with my parents before taking the train to Paris for 5 days with my parents-in-law, sister-in-law, and her husband. Like previous blogger and London/Paris tourist Fight the Future, I saw a whirlwind of sights in both locations, keeping busy and expanding my horizons by experiencing new things.
In London we took comprehensive walking tours, bus tours, and boat tours with amazing live guides. We saw Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, went on the London Eye, explored Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, spent hours strolling around the Thames, traipsed through the markets of Notting Hill, and sat in several lovely pubs having quality family chats over delicious meat pies, fish ‘n chips, and ales.
(London Eye… amazing views from here)
In Paris we followed maps and each other by foot around charming neighborhood after charming neighborhood, and people-watched from cute café after creperie after café. We took in the flavor of the city, seeing “the real Paris”, enjoying the yummiest treats, and soaking in the fabulous Parisian fashion and building styles. In the process we saw lots of famous sights – the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, La Conciergerie, Amelie’s café, the Moulin Rouge, etc. – and the wandering was supplemented by bus and boat tours (in the stereotypically disaffected French way rather than the enthusiastic British style, of course, but this only added to the experience!).
(Eiffel Tower!!!)
(Moulin Rouge… oohlala! We stayed nearby)
To be completely honest though, I’m not much for sightseeing in and of itself. My museum/monument/history attention span tends to be about 15 minutes! And with preparations for final exams taking over the weeks leading up to the trip, I hadn’t mapped out much of anything specific that I was dying to do in either location. Nonetheless, it worked out. Thanks to our families’ advanced planning, even I, the non-sightseer, had fun seeing sights.
But as great as London and Paris were, visiting with our families was much more the focus of the trip. Sightseeing served as the activity in the background, but sharing the experience and spending time with each other was the point of the trip. My sister-in-law is very pregnant at the moment, and getting to visit with her and her husband during that time and share the excitement was particularly special. Plus, during the course of the week we were able to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday, my birthday, and my dad’s 60th birthday.
However, while I’m being honest, the trip wasn’t entirely what I expected either. Asked how the trip was, my kneejerk reaction would be to say “great!” in much the same way that I’d answer “how are you?” with some variation on “good” whether I’d just won the lottery or fallen gravely ill. And in this case, “great” would be a pretty accurate description of the vacation for all the aforementioned reasons. But it also skims over all of the challenges of participating in family vacations as an adult. For whatever reason, I hadn’t stopped to consider these dynamics in any kind of depth in advance of the trip, and found myself caught off guard.
Reflecting on childhood family vacations, inevitably after a certain number of hours of togetherness, one or more people would get fed up with the sharing of close quarters, lack of control over the course of events, or just with each other. A squabble would ensue, be resolved, and everyone would calm down, apologize, and move on. Unpleasant and imperfect as this system may have been, it always allowed me as a kid to release frustration and feel better. I never thought twice about being a nudge. As far as I was concerned, that was my job. I’d pick fights with my brother and make “Are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet?” the soundtrack of long car rides, much to my parents’ chagrin, purely for my own entertainment. Looking back on it, I was mostly just being a brat! But my parents had the patience of saints and it made so many family vacations tolerable and fun for me.
s an adult, I like to think that I’m slightly less of a brat. I have less of a sense of entitlement when it comes to being selfish and making those around me miserable, even if they are family members who will love me no matter what. I still feel 100% at home with my family, no matter where we are, and am comfortable voicing preferences and displaying annoyance, but gone are the days when I could throw guilt-free temper tantrums and gripe openly about what my family is doing to embarrass me and what I’d rather be doing. This sense of responsibility to behave like a grown-up throughout the course of the trip proved to some extent to be an exercise in patience with my own family, but doubly so with my in-laws – though by no fault of their own!
o matter how wonderful they are (and they are wonderful), and no matter how much I consider them to be family (and I do), I think I’ll always walk on eggshells a bit more with them. I’ve always gotten the impression that he was a far better behaved child than I in most regards, and that the type of button-pushing I inflicted upon my parents growing up is not something he ever would have dreamed of pulling on his. So it is that, as an adult, Mr. Snackcake is still extremely accommodating – with everyone, including his family. This is a lovable quality about him, and I usually benefit from it more than anyone, but not in the case of the family vacation. After all, if he wouldn’t complain about anything to his own family, how could I? And so I felt the need to be even less imposing and became somewhat of an indecisive mute whenever any type of decision-making arose – whether I felt strongly about things or not. When it came to my own personal needs, I tried to communicate them via Mr. Snackcake through surreptitious glares or sharp elbow jabs to the ribs. Though poor Mr. Snackcake informed me time and again that try as he might he does not speak fluent mute glare, he displayed endless patience for my grown-up shenanigans.
We learned that on future family vacations, it will be worthwhile for us to play a more active role in setting agendas, booking comfortable places to stay, and making sure we’ve slept enough so as not to be exhausted upon arrival. More importantly though, I learned that grown-up family vacations are all about compromise. Everyone always wants everyone else to be happy, and while such efforts are admirable and good, sometimes the attempts to please everyone result in pleasing no one. Which is okay! In such settings I need to either find a calm voice and use it (as an alternative to the frustrated silent sulk I adopted throughout this trip or the familiar tantrums of yesteryear) or simply relinquish control, accept things as they come, and enjoy everything I can of the sights and the people.
And now that I’m done ranting about the challenges of taking family trips without being able to whine like a child, I ought to mention that there were also plenty of perks to vacationing with our families as adults. Regardless of how little we took advantage of it, we did have a say in what we were going to do, and our opinions were weighted equally with the rest of the grown-ups. Also, having your own money goes a long way. While out and about, if we wanted a treat or souvenir, we could buy it on the spot rather than having to beg the parents. Paying our own way also meant that we could choose our accommodations. In London we sprung for a nice view in the hotel… because we could! In Paris, we ventured off into the city for several hours of alone time on my birthday… because we could! The freedom of adulthood is awesome, and while it can make the return to slow-to-evolve family dynamics a shock to the system, it also alleviates them to some extent.
While there are plenty of things I’d do differently if I could go back in time and repeat this trip, I miss both of our families already and would do it over again in a heartbeat, hands down. Above all, the opportunity to spend extended time with our loved ones was irreplaceable and is something that comes along far too infrequently these days. Someday I’m sure I’ll return to Paris on a romantic getaway with Mr. Snackcake, and I can only hope to vacation with both of our families again and again in the years to come. I’m a firm believer that in all things, practice makes perfect, and I think that learning how to travel with our families as adults is a skill we’re new to developing but which can be fine-tuned with each trip to set us up for family adventures that become smoother and smoother for us all in the future.
In the meantime, I’m pretty darn lucky in terms of the day-to-day life to which I’ve returned. With classes on break for the next several weeks, I’ve quite literally come home to a vacation from vacation. And being back home, despite finally having free reign to throw as many temper tantrums as my grown-up heart desires… I really can’t complain!
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Family Vacation – All Grown Up, Times Two, & Figuring Out What To Do is part of our Summer Series.
